Steel-Cut Sugar And Sugar Scissors

I prefer brown sugar in my coffee. It is a matter of taste, which I have, because white sugar is nasty once you've branched out and realized that it is merely the lowbrow cousin with the dead tooth next to its finer relatives.

I don't know what I'm talking about. Just stay away from white sugar. It menaces children and shows porn to old people on the bus.

My brown sugar does no such thing. It is sweet and good and goes to confession three times a week. Its one downside, though, is that it gets hard. There are some things that are embettered when they get hard, but not so my sugar.

Stop snickering, please. That was a perfectly innocent sentence.

A brown sugar lump hangs out on an old Underwood.

Above is my brown sugar. It has grown so hard that it has thrown off its plastic bag and roams proud and free wherever it is needed throughout my apartment.

I think I have been paying far too much attention to penis enlargement spam lately.

At any rate, my sugar is very solid. I was not sure how to deal with it one morning when I had poured myself a cup of coffee and could not manage to saw off a lump of the stuff. I tried a paring knife and a huge serrated blade, I stabbed at it with a potato peeler, and I even put it back in its bag and started banging on it with a hammer. Using the hammer was a bad decision on my part, because it only seemed to further compact the sugar lump. Also, it alarmed the Palinode.

What the fuck are you doing? he asked, looking up from his Harpers.

Just hammering the sugar, I answered as nonchalantly as possible.

You know, there are other ways to deal with that, he said, and rather than ask him for details, I continued to hammer for a while longer, because why take the easy route when you can experiment on your condiments with large, destructive instruments?

It was at that moment that the heavy duty scissors in my toolbox caught my eye. I figured that if they were supposed to be able to cut metal wires, they could surely at least make a dent in my sugar lump.

A brown sugar lump is threatened by some serious scissors.

And lo, it worked! Steel-cut sugar was born.

It is not uncommon now to hear the Palinode call me to the kitchen to cut my sugar when he makes coffee. I know that there are other ways I could deal with this, like throwing the sugar in the microwave for fifteen seconds with a slice of bread, for instance, but this new method of sugar disbursement brings a little extra excitement back to my coffee routine.

Also? My toolbox scissors are now known as the Sugar Scissors, which means that I am an inventor who has successfully invented two things simultaneously: steel-cut sugar and sugar scissors. I am going to get on one of those infomercial shows, cut sugar for an hour into blenders/onto toast/over desserts while an audience oohs and aahs over my visionary kitchen implement, and make a million dollars. I just know it.